Future of Cloud Replication, powered by SRM

HOSTING has been deeply involved with VMware’s Site Recovery Manager since the 2011 launch of 5.0. In that time, vSphere Replication has become a huge competency for our team. As we work to be a consultative partner with our customers, HOSTING’s version of SRM (HOSTING Cloud Replication) has become key when keeping that customer up and running in case of clinical or physical disaster.

At VMworld there was a lot of vSphere Replication buzz as VMware announced the availability of 5.5. While everyone knows that it takes time, planning, and ultimately execution to get multiple environments to a new major release of VMware’s infrastructure, some of the highlights that will drive customer value include:

Multiple point in time recovery, supporting up to 24 points in time. I look forward to the day when this is exposed via API

Snapshots now available via Snapshot Manager. They only show up on the recovered VMs at the recovery site

Claims of dramatic replication performance improvements, with some customers seeing up to 5x faster seeding of data and continuous replication

And yes, early returns are that 5.5 will be compatible with vSAN, which means another opportunity to take advantage of vSAN’s capex advantages without losing functionality.

At the end of the day, protecting your Cloud infrastructure with a tool such as SRM or Zerto is all about risk.

I have told, more than once, the real story about my friend, Jim, who runs a data center in Manhattan. For years he couldn’t prioritize disaster recovery in their budgeting process. We all know that over 70% of disaster-related failures are clinical (i.e., not natural), so he combatted the clinical by protecting himself: He executed tabletop recovery exercises, enacted careful change management, and did traditional backups. That was enough for Jim’s CIO.

Then came along Sandy. Needless to say, Jim’s business continuity and disaster recovery business is booming these days.